


Still Life

by themegalosaurus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Gen, Horror, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Men of Letters Bunker, Psychological Horror, Sam-Centric, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 07:31:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10381659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus/pseuds/themegalosaurus
Summary: "On any other day, in any other year, maybe, he’d doubt what he was seeing. But over the past couple months Sam’s supped with God and the devil, had a hug from his long-dead mom, seen his brother restored to life. So yeah, maybe he’s never quite sure that this isn’t an hallucination; not sure that he isn’t in the basement with the British, in the cage with Lucifer, in another of the Wednesdays that just won’t end. But in this reality, whatever its authenticity, what he’s seeing now outside the bunker isn’t alien enough to shock."Jessica Moore comes back to life. She's not what Sam expects.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for the 2017 [Sam Winchester Big Bang](http://samwinchesterbigbang.tumblr.com) and was very fortunate to have the amazing [Amberdreams](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com) do the artwork. You can find her masterpost, which talks about her art in more detail, [here](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com/481797.html).
> 
> I started this fic back in November and was planning something short that could be finished by November 2nd (a couple days in the future). Then I planned a 5 - 15k minibang. Please note the total wordcountwith a hollow laugh.
> 
> Finally I owe enormous thanks to [indefinissable](http://archiveofourown.org/users/indefinissable) for being a very very diligent and thoughtful beta, the expert midwife to this creepy son. Any lumps and bumps are my fault and lots of the good bits are hers.

Sam wakes up with a miserable hangover, his mouth furry and sour and a throbbing knot of pain behind his eyes. He forgot to turn off his alarm when he went to bed, so the tinny ring of it sounds out at 6.30 like it always does, and when he rolls over to hit the snooze button the date at the top of the screen blinks out at him. November 2nd. It’s shock enough to jolt him fully awake, dreamless alcohol-heavy sleep dropping away to leave him shaky and unrested. Suddenly chilly under the scratchy blanket, he sits up in bed and draws his knees up to his chest. He hugs his arms around them, staring unseeing into the gloom.

Dean’s enthusiasm – no, his unsettling determination – for them both to get blackout drunk last night is starting to make more sense. He’s been volatile, unpredictable, since Mom walked out two weeks ago. That night, Dean had gone to bed straight away, hadn’t said anything to Sam until he’d appeared in the library the next morning with an unconvincing grin, bearing overfull plates of breakfast and absolutely insistent on taking a hunt he’d found somewhere in the Arizona wild. On the road, he’d blasted the music and slapped down Sam’s attempts to talk, hooked up with two women in one night (and in the bed next to Sam’s), and finally argued Sam into an ill-researched confrontation with a Balrog, which almost got both of them killed. They’d dispatched it eventually, although it had burned the both of them badly, so that Dean’s blistered now down one side of his torso and Sam can’t fully close the fingers of his right hand.

After that bungled job, Dean stopped pretending to cope. The journey back had been near-silent, Dean’s mouth a grim line of fury, his hands gripped white around the wheel, and Sam had sat with a churning stomach and looked out the window, focused on controlling the panic he could barely tamp down. He’s spent too much time, these past few years, with Dean stalking panther-like through the bunker’s halls. Wherever it’s directed – inward, outward - Dean’s anger frightens him now.

Since they got back from Arizona, he’s been jittery with tension, trying to negotiate around Dean’s wounded pain while he wrestles with his own aching loss. He tells himself, it’s good that Mary left when she did; it’s good that she had that sense of self-preservation; good, too, that she went before she could learn too much about the boys - now men - she left behind. Better to be rejected for the change he can’t help than for the long list of flaws and faults and sins she doesn’t yet know. Still, her absence vacates a space Sam had only noticed after she arrived and filled it - a solid block of foundation materializing under his uncertain feet. Now it’s gone again and he feels newly unsteady, waking at night to phantom fingers ghosting over his shoulders, to the echoes of soft words that make him sick. The walls of the bunker seem to contract around him, wavering as he paces the corridors through the night.

Where Sam is restless, Dean is still. He takes up residence in a room for days on end, sits there accumulating bottles around him and sifting through a stack of photos now sticky and dog-eared with use. Fighting down his anxiety, Sam has twice approached his brother to try and open conversation. Both times, he’s been rebuffed.

“At least we have each other,” he’d said to Dean on the second occasion, and Dean had looked at him inscrutable and pursed his lips. It had made Sam lead-heavy conscious of the weight of his own inadequacy, right from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes. Dean’s eyes had flicked over him, up and down.

“Yeah,” Dean had said eventually, and taken another drink.

All this to explain why, when Dean stopped him as he walked through the library last night - when he raised a glass in Sam’s direction, amber-gold - Sam took it so gratefully and never stopped to think about why. Maybe this was a turning point, he’d thought. Maybe Dean had done with the first days of his grieving. Maybe he was ready to talk.

Dean _had_ talked, with a kind of aggressive nostalgia that Sam had welcomed initially before the force of it had begun to concern him. “Let’s talk about the good times,” Dean had said, “we don’t need anybody else, hey, Sammy, you’re right.” Then he had begun to list off what he considered their greatest hits, a familiar round of anecdotes and in-jokes and stupid stories, stuff that they’d done together as kids and all through the years they’d been back on the road. Maybe Sam was just jaded, Mom’s doubts about the life proving more unsettling than they ought, but he couldn’t help but be struck by the inadequacy of the happinesses that Dean was trying to describe. Remember that burger, that baseball game, that transient moment. Remember that day when it wasn’t completely awful. Remember how things were and how they are and how they’ll stay the same. “We’re saving lives, Sam,” said Dean, and he was still pouring whisky, and Sam wasn’t sure how many glasses he’d had but his vision was blurring and his hands and feet felt very far away.

He doesn’t remember getting to bed, beyond vague images of walls and corners lurching into his vision, and now he comes to assess the situation he finds that he’s still wearing his jeans. So. November 2nd. Well, that makes a lot more sense. It’s never been a good day for Dean. Now, with a mother to mourn twice over… He wonders if Dean managed it, the oblivion he seemed to be looking for; wonders how many bottles of whisky that took. Sam should probably go check on him, make sure he’s not vomited or choked. But his head is throbbing and his hands are shaking and the thought of dealing with his brother, embarrassed and angry and in denial, is just too much right now.

For a moment, Sam considers going back to bed: retreating back under the blanket and staying there for the whole godforsaken 24 hours. It’s not just… Mom’s isn’t the only loss he’s mourning, Jess died on this day too and right now he feels all too raw to consider what her memory usually connotes, the sunshine life that slipped through his fingers so many years ago. He’s just. He’s too tired for this shit. Too tired. But the phrase sets Lucifer’s fingertips spider-walking up his spine, and the bed begins to lose its appeal.

Instead, he goes for a run. There’s no sign of Dean as he moves through the bunker, no sign of anybody in the woods around, and he runs and runs and runs until his muscles are screaming. He’s grateful now, inside his bones, for the isolated peace of their home. By the time he’s done his body feels alive again, feels his, the hot burn in his chest a bright point of connection tethering him down to his flesh.

Breathing heavy, drenched in sweat, he’s walking the last fifty yards back home when he rounds the corner of the road and sees somebody standing outside the front door. It’s a woman, tall and blonde, and naturally he thinks immediately of Mom; but where her hair is short and choppy, now, this person’s falls in long waves down her back. Not Mom, then, and not Lady Bevell either, despite the sharp stab of fear that tears into Sam’s stomach at the split-second thought. This girl at their door is entirely different, not slim and narrow and small like the Englishwoman but tall and softly curvaceous. Something in the lines of her figure chimes in Sam’s mind, and in an instant he knows who she is. On any other day, in any other year, maybe, he’d doubt what he was seeing. But over the past couple months Sam’s supped with God and the devil, had a hug from his long-dead mom, seen his brother restored to life. So yeah, maybe he’s never quite sure that this isn’t an hallucination; not sure that he isn’t in the basement with the British, in the cage with Lucifer, in another of the Wednesdays that just won’t end. But in this reality, whatever its authenticity, what he’s seeing now outside the bunker isn’t alien enough to shock.

It’s Jess.

It’s Jess, wearing not the unfamiliar nightgown she was burned in, but the teeny-tiny Smurf pyjamas she wore the night that Dean showed up at their apartment. She’s barefoot, feet shifting on the cold November ground; and as Sam walks up to her, trying his best to look unthreatening, she turns. She’s holding a mug. ‘World’s #1 Dad.’

“Jessica,” he says, aiming for reassuring confidence but sounding awkward and hearty to his own ears. Then he panics – too informal? “Jessica Moore.”

She frowns, and the expression is so familiar that Sam almost gasps with the cold-water shock of his déjà vu. It’s not like he hasn’t dreamed of Jessica, over the years. But seeing her, not the soft-focus beauty who exists in his memory but a real woman, cold and pissed-off and confused, opens up a whole reservoir of confused emotion he’d thought had evaporated years ago.

She adjusts her stance, moving minutely closer towards him, and her features shift into fear. “ _Sam?_ ” she says. Her hands clutch the mug, stupid sign of Chuck’s involvement. She looks toward the bunker, back at his face. “What happened?”

 _What happened to you,_ Sam hears. The question lands heavy in his stomach, weighted with all the freight of the years between them. He’s old, now, significantly older than Jess and so different to the kid whose memory she must be struggling to reconcile with the haggard, scruffy man before her. Jesus. If it’s - if her situation’s anything like Mom’s, then for Jess it’s only two days ago that Sam set off for Jericho. He was a different person back then: fresh-faced and nervously hopeful, a future sketched out before him. And now. What happened?

“I’m not sure,” he says.

Jess lifts one hand to rub the back of her neck, looks out and around at the trees, the frosty morning. “I died,” she says.

“Yes,” Sam says. He gestures vaguely toward his own face, whatever story it’s telling. “It’s been twelve years.”

Jess nods. Her shoulders are tight and she’s hunched in on herself, from cold or fear or flat confusion. Maybe all three. Sam notices the goosebumps prickling the clear skin of her arms. The warmth of the run is already starting to seep out of him, his T-shirt sticking chilly to his chest. Jess, in what’s barely more than underwear, must be freezing.

“Look, come in.” He steps forward to unlock the door. Jess tenses up as he moves past her, straining away from his touch. Sam bites the inside of his lip, tries to focus on his disobediently clumsy fingers as they fumble the key.

“Where are we?” says Jess as he scratches at the lock. At last the metal slides home. Sam opens the door and steps in.

“Lebanon, Kansas,” he says.

“You’re from Kansas,” Jess says, uncertain.

“Yeah, but not here.” He heads downstairs, looks up behind him to where Jess is hovering awkward in the entry. “Come in. I can… let’s find you something warmer to wear. Something to eat. Okay?”

She hesitates, looks around, and then starts after him. “And this is where you live? You’re living here, now?”

“Yeah.” Sam finds it hard to conceive what kind of impression she’ll pick up from this place. Looked at through a stranger’s eyes, it must seem institutional; the big military-looking map table in the middle of the central room, the phone lines, the library. A barracks, a college, not a home. “We were kind of… it was left to us, to me and Dean, by our grandfather. Kind of.”

“I thought… You said all your grandparents were dead way back,” Jess says.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “It’s complicated.” He doesn’t say, you were dead too.

He heads for the kitchen (more industrial units), motions to the table and has Jess sit at the bench seat while he pokes through the cupboards for something that she might want to eat. In the end, he just pours a second bowl of the granola that he’d intended for his own breakfast, slicing bananas and strawberries onto the cereal before he tops it off with yoghurt and milk. He slides the bowl across the table, the base of it scraping hollow over the wood. Then he turns on the coffee machine, the mechanism grinding slowly into life, and sits down opposite Jess. She looks at him for a second before starting to eat, and they crunch through the cereal for a few moments in silence. Sam’s not sure what to say, his brain still working three-quarter speed through his hangover, his body responding to Jess’s presence in ways that he’s not quite sure about. He wants to touch her, to crush her against him, to feel that she’s _real -_ but he doesn’t want to scare her. He knows what he looks like. (And she’s so _young_ , barely more than a teenager.)

“You seem very calm about this,” Jess says eventually, with a small, tight smile.

Sam could say the same for her, but then, he’s been brought back from the dead himself and he’s not sure there’s a right way to react. And he _knows_ Jess. Under the surface self-containment, she’s freaking out. Her expression is brittle, the kind of polite hostility she used to practise on guys who hit on her in clubs. She was always - Jess is a bombshell. So that happened to her a lot. (They’d fallen out about it early on, Sam’s tendency to square up to the guys, to escalate. “I don’t need you to be a fricking knight in shining armour,” Jess had told him shortly. “I can handle it.” She could, but that didn’t mean it didn’t bother her.)

When he doesn’t respond, she prompts him. “Sam. I don’t understand. Did you… Fuck. This is crazy. Did you do something to bring me back?”

“No,” Sam says, surprised. “No, it wasn’t me.” What kind of a person would he have to be, to do that - to do that _now?_ Twelve years later, and still in love with his college girlfriend, necromancing her back from the dead like some kind of… animated sex toy. Emotions toy. He’s dealt with zombies before. No thanks.

“Then why aren’t you more afraid?” Jess says, sharp, and yeah, okay. She’s not stupid. She’s a kid, but she isn’t dumb.

“Okay,” Sam says. “Okay. There’s some stuff that I need to tell you.”

That’s when Dean walks in.

“Mom?”

They both look around, at that, and Sam watches his brother’s face fall. Dean is still wearing the same shirt he had on last night. Sam’s not sure he hasn’t been wearing it for the whole past week. The shirt is red and it always makes Sam anxious. It’s the shirt Dean was wearing when he almost put a hammer through Sam’s head. Now, though, he doesn’t look like the kind of guy that would do that. He looks like a kid whose puppy just got taken away.

Lost-puppy Dean says, “I heard you talking. I thought.”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “Um.”

It takes until then for Dean to look at Jess, to notice her as something other than just not-Mom. He glances at her now without any recognition, turning back to Sam with a look of startled incredulity Sam’s not seen since Sully showed up in the middle of their kitchen. “Did you go and… when did you… did I sleep through an extra day or something?”

“So,” Sam says, tone carefully neutral, “this is Jessica.”

Dean blinks, blank-faced for a moment; and then his eyes widen, narrow into thoughtful slits. He looks at Jess again, assessing now, and his eyes are still tight although his mouth is smiling as he says, “Yeah. Should have remembered those Smurfs.”

Jess crosses her arms uncomfortably. Sam’s suddenly aware of how little she’s wearing.

“She was on the doorstep,” Sam says. “I was. I went for a run.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I know, dude. You reek.” He opens his hands. “So what is this? Any more visitors we can expect? Is Dad gonna pop up while I’m in the shower? Because I’d prefer to be prepared for that one.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sam says. “I mean…” and he indicates the mug on the table between them. “I guess if Amara, um. If she thought you’d like Mom back. Then maybe Chuck.”

“Great,” Dean says. “Good luck with that.” He walks into the kitchen now, to the coffee machine; stands with his back to them and fills up the cup he’s holding. There’s a clink like metal against the ceramic rim of the mug and a whisky tang fills the air, making Sam’s queasy stomach protest. Dean turns around. “I’m going back to bed,” he says.

Sam and Jess watch his retreating back, watch the doorway after he’s gone.

“Sorry,” Sam says. “He’s not.”

Jess frowns, looks down at her crossed arms. “Sure.”

“Look,” Sam says. “I owe you an explanation, or what I can give of it. But first maybe we should get you some clothes.”

He takes her to a bedroom around the corner from his own; not too close that she feels oppressed by it, near enough that she can come find him without getting lost. It’s a fresh room, not one of those used by Charlie or Kevin or Mom, just another amongst the maze of uniform dormitories from which Sam’s own is still hardly distinguishable. He hits the storage cupboard along the hall to pick up blankets, stacks them on Jessica’s bed, and then goes to raid his own wardrobe for something that she can wear.

“I’ll leave you to get on with it,” he says, and retreats to his own room where he can freak out in peace. Fuck. He’d thought Mom’s return was bad, destabilising, following as it had so immediately close on the loss and restoration of Dean. But Mom had made Dean happy, and for Sam she’d felt like… like a possibility, he supposes, somebody he’d dreamt of forever finally coalesced into flesh. He’d felt like new connections were opening up in front of him, another chance with the family into which he’d never quite fit. That was why her choosing to leave had hit so hard. With Jess, it’s different, and he’s starting to understand Dean’s shaken reaction to Mom. She both is and isn’t the person he knew: is, because she’s right there, vivid and responsive and unpredictable. Isn’t, because the past twelve years have nudged her, too, into the imaginary. Jess means things in the grand scheme of Sam’s life, of Dean’s life, too, is the basis of stories in which she’s had no hand and which he ought not to expect her to bear. She never asked to be back here, back out in the cold grey world.

“Sam?”

He looks up and she’s in the doorway, and his heart does a funny skip-jump. This is another part of the problem: the emotional muscle-memory that Jess’s return has set sparking through his body, all of him down to his organs jolting back to the feelings and responses of another Sam from a decade ago. Sam had thought her beautiful then. She _is_ beautiful. Sam’s sex life might be pretty pitiful, but he isn’t blind to this stuff, whatever witty remarks Dean makes. Jess is a beautiful woman, and what’s more confusing, he knows what it’s like to touch her - he’s felt her - they’ve _done_ things together and the images of it all keep slipping through unexpected, unbidden, surprising him. And he isn’t okay with it. She’s so much younger, and she’s been brought vulnerable into his home. She’s counting on him not to be a jerk or a creep, so he has to do better. Be better.

“I don’t, uh.” She’s wearing the stuff he gave her, a navy-blue T-shirt that shrank in the wash and a pair of the soft black pants he sleeps in. Jess isn’t small but both garments hang loose around her, the shoulders of the T-shirt sitting down toward her elbows and the cord of the pants knotted tight in a trailing bow. She has her arms crossed over her chest again, the same way she did when Dean commented on her pyjamas. “This is embarrassing, but I could do with picking up a bra.”

“Oh!” says Sam. “Oh, of course. Um.” He can feel himself blush. It’s stupid. How many times has he handled Jess’s bras? And not just to… to take them off, in bed, but - well, they used to live together. He’s done her laundry, bought her lingerie for Christmas. He’s bought her fricking _tampons_ , for goodness’ sake. But it’s precisely that history that’s making things difficult, the memory of intimacy so long past clashing with the palpable alienation between them now. It’s uncomfortable, inappropriate, like he’s read a stranger’s diary without their permission. He doesn’t know Jess. He knows her better than just about anyone.

Lebanon hasn’t got much in the way of… anything, really, so Sam drives up the road to Smith Center, a slightly bigger small town maybe half an hour away. He’s not confident that they’ll find anywhere for Jess to shop, but they wind up in a big warehouse on the outskirts of town that sells farm equipment, homewares and apparently, women’s clothing.

Jess looks at the twelve bras hanging on the rack, flipping through them for a moment with her fingertips before she shrugs and carries all twelve of them into the changing room. Sam loiters awkwardly in the clothing section, running his fingers absently over the garments on the rails. He’s wondering what the shop staff must be thinking, what they think might be the relationship between himself and Jess. Boyfriend and girlfriend? Does he look old enough to be her dad? He’s going grey, has been for a couple years now, silvery streaks at his temples which Dean will tease him about after a couple of drinks. He hopes they don’t think he’s some kind of creep, trading the cheap underwear for something unsavoury.

The fact he’s still loitering here in the women’s clothing section probably isn’t helping his cause. He crosses the aisle to poke around the men’s overalls, looking at the workboots (they’ve got nothing in his size) before moving to browse idly through a rack of flannel.

“That’s nice,” says Jess, appearing at his elbow. Sam looks down at the shirt that’s held between his fingers, a plaid in shades of blue and green. “You gonna get it? Green suits you.”

“Oh,” he says, startled. “No, I hadn’t…” His fingers close around the hanger. “Sure.”

Jess hands him two bras, one grey cotton and the other black lace, alongside a denim shirtdress, a khaki skirt and a black T-shirt. “Is this okay? I don’t… I mean, I haven’t got any money. But.”

“Oh,” Sam says. “Yes, of course.” Now he really does feel like an old pervert, kitting out his new girl. At the register, he worries that the saleswoman is judging him. She’s middle-aged, scarlet-haired, severe. He half-expects her to take Jess aside as they leave and ask her if she needs saving; but thankfully, they make it out of both store and parking lot without anybody staging an intervention, which means that Sam looks either old enough to be Jess’s dad or young enough not to creep people out. It’s probably a good thing that he’s unlikely to find out which.

“We should get some groceries, too,” Sam says as they edge out of town, pulls in at the minimart on the outskirts. “I can cook. D’you, uh… you’re vegetarian, right?”

Jess frowns. “I haven’t been vegetarian for like six months, Sam.” She pauses. “Well, I guess, like, twelve years and six months, but.”

“Sorry,” Sam says, thrown. “Sorry, I just remembered that you had been. I didn’t…”

“It’s okay,” Jess says. “It’s a long time.” She smiles at him, but she looks more anxious than anything else. Sam feels bad. He doesn’t need to make her more uneasy than she already feels. Fortunately she seems to shake it off easily enough when they get into the store, taking off on her own unprompted to browse the shelves for whatever it is that she needs. He finds himself eyeing the items she puts into the cart suspiciously, as though her choices will give him clues about the living woman in front of him. It’s nonsense, obviously, and all he discovers is her unhealthy obsession with Hot Pockets and apparent affinity for off-brand shampoo. Then again, that might just be a symptom of her concerns about spending his money. Back at Stanford, in the life Jess remembers like yesterday, neither of them had much to spare. Sam almost had a panic attack the day they signed for their apartment. The rent had been more than they’d initially intended to pay and the deposit had eaten almost every cent they had. (“It’s worth it, right, babe?” Jess had said, as Sam earnestly struggled not to vomit all over their new kitchen floor. “You and me. The love nest. The boudoir.”)

When they get home, Dean’s in the library, drinking. A near-empty bottle of whisky stands on the table alongside a six-pack of beer. Most of the bottles are back in their cardboard cradle but Sam can’t see from here how many have already been emptied.

Sam stops in the archway, Jess beside him.

“I thought you left,” Dean says. Sam lifts the grocery bags he’s carrying. Dean’s expression doesn’t change, but he turns back toward the table, draining the glass in his hand.

“Dean -” Sam says. He watches as his brother pours out the remainder of the whisky, shaking the bottle to coax the last drops free.

Jess clears her throat. “I’ll go put this stuff away.” She takes the bags from Sam’s hands, walks out the door toward the kitchen.

Sam waits until her footsteps have retreated before he speaks. “Did you really think we actually just left? Like, I’d just take her and drive away into the sunset. ‘Goodbye Dean, it was nice knowing you, see you around?’”

“Mom did it,” Dean says. “You’ve done it before.” Well. Sam could have predicted that. Amongst his brother’s many finer qualities, Dean also possesses an unparalleled ability to hold a grudge. He’s a palimpsest of wrongs. Nothing Sam’s done to him ever disappears; it just sinks deeper below the surface, overwritten by the latest transgression but lurking still, waiting to be dredged up from the darkness when the moment’s right. Then six months or two years later, there it is, suddenly standing out in bold print like it was never erased, never faded under the weight of all the other accusations piled on top of it. Earning Dean’s forgiveness is a Sisyphean feat. Sam could spend his whole life rolling that stone uphill.

For now, then, Sam chooses to let that last comment go.

“I didn’t ask for this,” is what he says instead. “I never… it’s not like I was lying in bed this morning wishing that my long-dead girlfriend would turn up at the door. Real life doesn’t work like that. Come on, Dean. I mean… did you ask for Mom?” It’s a rhetorical question but he’s suddenly struck by the possibility. He hadn’t thought that Dean devoted much thought to their mother, these days - but hadn’t Dean, black-eyed and snarling, castigated Sam for her death? Who’s to say what he might have asked for, when Amara offered? (Sam wonders what he would have demanded himself, given the chance of a single wish; pulls himself out of that rabbit hole before he gets too deep.) “I didn’t…” Sam says again. “Look, man. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with her. What’s she gonna _do_ , here?”

“Yeah,” says Dean. He looks a little more thoughtful now, less pissed, but he doesn’t show any signs of becoming more communicative during the two or three minutes Sam waits.

Cutting his losses, Sam goes back into the kitchen to find that Jess has put all the shopping away and flattened the paper bags. “I didn’t know if you recycled,” she says. “Actually, I fucking hope you recycle, Sam. At least I can choose not to destroy the fucking planet, even if everything else has gone to shit.” She laughs, on the edge of hysteria. “Sorry. Shit.”

Sam doesn’t know how much of that conversation she overheard. “Look -”

“Sam, please. Can you please tell me what is going on?” She’s aiming for confidence but there’s a quaver somewhere low in her throat. “I died. And then I open my eyes and I’m here. And you mentioned. When you were talking to, to Dean this morning. You said you thought it had something to do with somebody called Chuck.”


	2. Chapter 2

You’d think that Sam might have rehearsed this moment: Telling Jessica the Truth. They dated for eighteen months. They _lived_ together. He had dinner with her parents, more than once. And all that time, he kept this huge part of his life, what had been really for nineteen years his whole life, away from her. But honestly, he never planned it at all. The whole of that long Greyhound journey to California, after that final argument where Dad told him he wasn’t welcome back home, Sam had spent convincing himself that this was his opportunity. Clean break. Close the door. When he got off the bus in Palo Alto, he was a different kid. That part of his life - that stuff - that didn’t exist any more. That all happened to other people. No. It didn’t happen to anybody. That stuff hadn’t ever happened in Sam’s new world. So no, he never even thought of telling her, never ran this conversation through or even pictured it in any more clarity than might be given in a dreadful dream. 

That said, he’s had plenty of practice at giving the talk, and in a lot of ways this instance is no great exception. He keeps it short, the standard-issue briefing he’s delivered a thousand times to victims of the supernatural, carefully formulated to minimise anxiety but inevitably life-changing nonetheless. Ghosts, witches, vampires, all the boogeymen you’ve ever heard of, all real. And for Jess, because she asked about it: God in a dressing gown. Like he would with the vics, Sam tries to keep himself out of it as much as he reasonably can. He tells Jess that something supernatural killed his mom, that that was what took their Dad out on the road and that he and Dean were raised that way, hunting evil. And now, since leaving Stanford - since she died - he’s been doing that again. 

Jess listens to him quietly. She doesn’t interrupt to ask questions; just lets him talk, tracing her fingertips over the grain of the table top. When he’s done, she stays silent while she finishes whatever pattern she’s making. Finally, she brings her forefingers together with careful precision and drops her hands in her lap.

“And you never told me,” she says. “Wow, Sam.”

It’s hard to be sure at this distance of time, but Sam felt like he was a pretty good boyfriend, when they were dating. Okay, so he worked too hard. Sometimes he didn’t make enough time for Jess. But that tone, this specific hard brittle sarcasm, he hardly ever earned that from her. It stings.

“You would have thought I was crazy,” he says. “Without knowing… without any evidence. You’d have tried to make me get counselling or something.”

“To be honest,” Jess says, “it sounds like that might have been a good idea.”

Sam laughs, despite himself. She isn’t wrong. “That’s just the thing, though. I was, when I knew you, I was trying to get away. It was scaring me. I wanted to get out. And so I didn’t, I couldn’t see myself as that person any more. You know?” He wants to say, you know, was it even so much of a lie? But it was, wasn’t it, Sam, because you knew it wasn’t working; you saw Jess burn in your dreams fifty times over before you lay back with your head on the pillow and watched it happen for real.

Jess nods. She doesn’t ask about the distance between there and here, the Sam chock-full of ideals and careful optimism who was writing hunting out of his future and the man sitting across from her now, steeped crown-deep in the life. Jess is smart. She can draw her own conclusions.

“The night I died - “ Jess says then, and Sam holds in a shiver. Does she - could she somehow know that he knew? She’s quiet, her head bowed, her hair hanging in a thick blonde curtain that obscures her face.

“Yeah,” says Sam. He hadn’t thought about that night for a long time, not before he woke up yesterday morning and saw the date. But it doesn’t take much of an effort of recall to remember the salient points. “You made cookies,” he says. Choc-chip-cinnamon, and the taste of chocolate had cloyed in his mouth ever since. 

“Yeah,” she says. Her fingers are moving again, tapping rhythmically against the wood. “I was, um. I was worrying about you and I was waiting for you to come home, and I thought, keep busy, so I made a lasagne for the freezer, and when you still weren’t home I baked. They were. I was, I left some out for you and I was just going to bed and then Brady - Sam, Brady came to the door.”

“Yes,” says Sam. He doesn’t know if he wants to hear this, not from Jessica’s point of view. She was so surprised - that was what Brady had told him, laughing up at him with a bloody nose from the centre of a demon trap. He’s imagined it, since, of course: Jess so defenceless, swinging wide the door and Brady there, probably acting drunk or stoned or stupid, swiping at the cookies and making her shake her head and laugh. And then his eyes would have flashed to black, and Jess would have stopped laughing.

It would probably be healthy to let her talk about it. But Sam doesn’t.

“I killed Brady,” he says.

Jess turns to look up at him. Her face is pale. “You killed him? When?”

Fair question, Sam supposes. As far as Jessica knows, he could have tracked Brady down almost as soon as it happened. “About five and a half years after. Six years ago.”

“And you just…” She presses her palms together. “Sorry. I. Did you kill him for me?”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “Kind of. I guess. I mean. He was, he got possessed by a demon. And it was killing people, so. But it was only then that I found out, that he’d been the one to, uh. With you.” He’d been so angry, then, self-destructive and fresh from figuring out what he would have to do, the sacrifice demanded by the world he’d wronged. Detroit. The demon blood. The long, slow fall into the Cage. He’d been… it had all felt enormous, out of control, and there Brady had been in front of him, a familiar face he’d laughed with and cared about and worried over, too, the first friend he’d made at college and the reason that Jess was dead. Sam had known, by then, that he couldn’t have escaped Lucifer. Even if he’d stayed at Stanford, it would have played out some way. But that knowledge was huge, unwieldy, and Brady had been right there, vulnerable flesh and sulphur-blood.

“Was he… what was he?” asks Jess. 

“He was a demon,” Sam says. He reconsiders. “Or there was a demon inside him. Possessing him. Controlling what he did.”

“At Stanford?”

“Yeah, well, no, not at first but eventually. Do you remember that Thanksgiving, when he -”

“He changed,” Jess says, short. It’s hard to believe at this distance of time how much Sam had worried about Brady, then: how serious of a problem it had seemed. The stuff he’s seen since then is so comically disproportionate in its significance, in how it’s fucked over both Sam and the world. But it had been, had felt, enormous: the distance between the quiet, nerdy kid Sam had relied on and the brash, wild, dangerous addict that Brady had suddenly become. Brady had been Jess’s friend too, and the two of them wasted hours of that final year in long, anxious conversations about what ought to be done. AA. NA. Counselling. They’d been back and forth on calling his parents, although Sam’s pretty sure that they never followed through. That had probably been for the best, all things considered.

“So it wasn’t really Brady,” Jess says. “He’d been… taken over. By that thing.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “It’s, uh. It wasn’t him.” He doesn’t know where Jess is going with this. Because it _wasn’t_ Brady: it wasn’t Brady who started on the drink and the drunks, not Brady who killed Jess and not Brady, either, who was working for Niveus. But the guy Sam killed, who he stabbed with Ruby’s knife? It was not-Brady, the demon, but it was Brady too. Of course Sam’s thought about that. Not often. Not as much as he should have. But he has, and he doesn’t think… he hopes that Brady wasn’t still alive in there. Six years of being trapped screaming at the back of your brain, that would break anybody. Even if Sam had done what he ought, spoken the exorcism or focused his mind, driven the demon back to hell or evaporated it in sparks, the shell it left behind would have been nothing like the man Sam knew. He’s sure - he’s almost sure of that.

“And me? What am I? A ghost? A - a zombie? Those are real, right?”

Sam nods. “They’re both, I’ve met both. But I don’t think you’re either. I think that you’re just… you.” Then he does what he should probably have done a lot earlier, and tells her about Mom, how she was brought back too, exactly the same as she’d been when she died thirty-three years ago today.. He says to Jess, “I can try to put you in touch, if you like. But I don’t know… I haven’t heard from her since she left. She wanted some time to figure things out.”

He’s waiting for Jess to call him out for omitting this crucial information first time around - waiting, really, for her to ask him what else he’s keeping secret, to pry out the truth of his own responsibility for her death. What she says next surprises him.

“Can I call my mom?”

“What?”

“My mom. Can I call her? I mean, I don’t know if she’s, if they’re still in the same house, but I could try, right? Or I could look her up, online.” Jess’s face is earnest, determined, and Sam feels the tingle of dread prickling his skin.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he says carefully.

“She’s my _mom_ ,” Jess says.

“Yes,” Sam says. “Yes.” He catches the end of his tongue in his teeth, bites down soft and tries to think of how to say what he means. “It’s just that. She’s your mom, but Jess, you died more than ten years ago. And I’m not - I’m not saying that she wouldn’t want you back, that she wouldn’t be over the moon to have you back, but you gotta… you gotta realise that it would change a lot of things for her. You know?”

“I don’t care,” Jess says, and her voice is rising, loud. “You got your mom back and she was dead for a lot longer than me. Why can’t I go find mine?”

“Jess, no,” Sam says, struggling to explain. “You have to see it’s not the same. I’m already in all this, this world. I can’t get out of it. Your family? They’re free. Don’t put that on them. You don’t understand what it can do to people.”

“It isn’t fair,” Jess says, and bursts into tears.

Oh, _no_. Sam is used to people crying on him, in this line of work; has developed a strong line in vague reassurances and comforting hands on the back. But it feels dishonest to slip into that persona with Jess. It’s not real emotion, most of the time, just a convenient sympathetic skin. The rare occasions where he’s genuinely moved are much more difficult to handle.

“Sorry,” he says lamely. He moves closer to her, shifts around to her side of the table, but he doesn’t want to touch her without asking permission and if he asks her then he’ll probably already be making things weird. “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

Jess draws in a shuddery breath, visibly willing herself calm. “Is it okay if I borrow your computer? I won’t contact them, I promise. I just want to look them up. Find out what… you know. Make sure they’re okay.”

Sam has misgivings but he feels like at this stage it would be unreasonable of him to insist. Jess is right. She didn’t ask for this. And it’s not much to want, to know that the people she cares about are doing all right. 

He sets her up with his laptop at the desk in her room, plugs in the password while she isn’t looking and disables all his more sensitive programmes. He doesn’t want a case alert popping up to assault her with a picture of a cattle mutilation or some unfortunate vic’s bloodied corpse while she’s browsing the net to find her parents. “All yours.”

Without his laptop he feels weirdly nervous, untethered. He’s not used to handing it over to somebody else. He goes first to have the shower he should have taken that morning and then hits the kitchen to start making dinner. Chicken casserole. That's easy.

He’s chopping leeks when Dean shows up, looking conciliatory. “Whoa,” he says, mock-surprised at seeing Sam in the kitchen. “The maestro at work.”

“Sure,” says Sam. His slicing immediately goes to shit. Something about Dean watching him cook always makes him awkward.

“Oh man,” Dean says, and hip-checks him out of the way to take over at the chopping board. “Don’t you have some herbs you can be stripping? Cavalry’s here.”

Sam doesn’t mind cooking as a sort of life necessity, but he doesn’t get the same satisfaction out of it Dean does. So he’s perfectly willing to resign ownership of the dinner, turning sous-chef as his brother buzzes happily around the kitchen. It’s comforting. Without anything said, the tension that’s been hanging between them the past few weeks has dissipated, Dean evidently convinced enough by Sam’s explanations about Jess to come out of his sulk.

With the two of them working together, dinner is ready within the hour. Sam calls Jess to the table, waits a moment. No movement, no noise. Still, it’s a big building. She probably just didn’t hear.

When he pushes open the door to her room, though, he finds her sat in front of the laptop, crying like she’d never calmed down. 

She turns the screen towards him. “Somebody made me a memorial,” she says. “On Facebook.”

“Oh,” says Sam. “Yeah, yeah, I guess it…”

She sniffs, wipes a hand messily across her face. “All these people left messages. Our friends. My parents. For years, sometimes. On the, the anniversary. Just, like, ‘Hey Jess. Missing you.’ It’s…”

Sam’s immediate, selfish reaction is guilt: he’s never, would never have even thought of making something like that, still less visiting it. He’s not sure he’s ever Googled Jess’s name. All these other people mourning her, all this time, and Sam had just vanished, dropped out.

“And, uh, “ she says. “My dad died. Six years ago. It was a, a heart attack.” A fresh wave of tears.

Sam meet Jess's dad probably five or six times during the eighteen months they dated. He was a quiet man with a big funny retro moustache, who used to wear knit sweaters and coloured tweed trousers. It would be harder to imagine anybody less like John. Jess's dad was so proud of her for being at Stanford. She bought him a pair of college cufflinks for Christmas one year and he used to wear them every time he came to visit, waving his wrists at waiting staff and making Jess embarrassed. “My bright girl,” he'd say. “She’ll be famous one day.”

“He was only sixty,” she says, sniffling. “And my mom. What will my mom do without him?” She balls her hands into fists and digs them hard into her eye sockets, speaks without looking at him. “Fuck. I don’t even know if I’m crying for him or for me. Both. Neither. Everybody else. Shit, Sam, this is _hard.”_

“I’m sorry,” Sam says. This is it, his cue to offer up his own experience, the eighteen months that went missing when he went to Hell. He’ll do it, usually - would likely do it for another victim. But he discovers that he isn’t ready to be that guy for Jess. He doesn’t want to have to try and explain about his soulless self, another dark space within the subterranea she’s only just unearthed. In any case, he’s not sure that what he could say about himself, the person that he was during that time, would strike her as being terribly different to the way that she sees him now. A killer’s a killer. Right?

“We, uh. Dinner’s ready,” he says instead. “If you.”

Jess rubs her open hands over her face, shakes her hair out so it’s mostly covering her features. “I think I’d rather just go to bed,” she says.

Sam brings her a plate regardless, leaves it on the desk while she’s in the shower. Back in the kitchen, he and Dean eat almost in silence. 

“She okay?” Dean says eventually.

Sam says, “I don't know.”

Sam sleeps badly, his head spinning with fractured memories of his earlier self. When he wakes up he goes to the library to try and sort it out. He’s spent a long time in here, filing then re-filing after the Stines sabotaged their books. He’s replaced most of the volumes worst-damaged in the fray, those with lighter fluid seeped into the pages or with spines that had cracked as a consequence of being so haphazardly piled. Of course, a lot of the original copies had marginal annotations correcting the lore or making recommendations for altered spells. When Sam is feeling anxious, it helps to work on transcribing those notes. The task demands the right combination of mindlessness and focus, keeping him busy without asking him to think all that much. This morning, he goes to his filing cabinet and digs out one of the chemical-damaged volumes, picks up the padded envelope in which the replacement arrived last week, and takes his best archive-quality black fineliner to sit down with at the library table and copy over some decades-old marginalia.

He’s been working for maybe an hour or two, scratching carefully away, when a voice says, “Looks familiar,” and he glances up to find Jess watching him from the steps. She’s wearing his big loose clothes and has a mug of coffee in her hands. That’s the thing about Jess - she’s quick to make herself at home. When they moved into their apartment, it took maybe half a day before the place felt like hers. Sam’s never had that knack. He and Brady were roommates for the whole of first year and it was like there was a forcefield dividing the two halves of their dorm; one side, a dorky medic with a good-looking family and a crush on Eva Longoria. The other side, blank. After nearly three years in California, when he and Jess shacked up, he’d been able to fit his worldly possessions into two file boxes. Jess had thought he was nuts. 

“You still working too hard?” she says, now. Sam shrugs. 

“Just keeping busy,” he says.

“Do you wanna, uh,” Jess says, “do you wanna hang out, or something? We could just watch a movie.” She looks sort of forlorn, hopeful and she _must_ be feeling lonely if she’s looking to Sam for company.

“Sure. I mean. I have Netflix,” says Sam.

Jess, of course, has barely heard of Netflix. When she died they were still sending DVDs in the mail. But she gets the hang of it easy enough, flicking through Sam’s ongoing series and settling finally on Planet Earth, which he’s already seen a couple times. Sam loves nature documentaries. He watches them at night when he’s unable to sleep. He’d forgotten until now that it was Jess who got him into them, curled up beside him on her pink twin bed in the big townhouse she used to share before she moved in with Sam. They’d try to impress each other with arcane facts about whatever they were watching, so that Sam had spent an increasingly unjustifiable amount of time in the campus science library during the months that they first hung out.

The second episode is on mountains and has giant panda searching for bamboo, so Sam tells Jess the good news: that last year, the species got reclassified from ‘endangered’ to ‘vulnerable’. It about blows her mind. 

“Dude!” she says. “Dude, though, you don’t - but _Sam_ \- they’re like the _symbol_ of the preservation movement, and to think! Oh my God!” She’s so animated, so excited, sat up straight from where they’ve both been slumped back against the headboard of Sam’s bed, that the sense of the life of her vibrates right through him. He has to fight the instinct to lift his hand to her shoulder and draw her down into a kiss. 

She catches his eye and he knows with absolute conviction that they’re sharing the thought. Most of the documentary evenings at the Stanford house, and later at their apartment, had ended the same way, the two of them making out inappropriately as life and death played out onscreen. But this isn’t then, and the stuff in the background right now might be equally brutal but it’s also a lot closer to home. They shouldn’t. Jess’s gaze flickers down to Sam’s mouth, back up so that her eyes meet his.

The Netflix gods save Sam from this one as the show rolls over and the next episode starts to play. The theme tune starts up and the moment’s broken. “Oooh,” says Jess. “‘Fresh water’.” She settles back beside him to watch. 

They call it a day after another couple episodes, which takes them well into the afternoon. Sam stretches, rolls his back, and Jess takes a look around his room. She takes a minute to inspect her own face in the age-spotted mirror that he has hanging over his sink, looks back at him over her shoulder. “So, today we learned Netflix is awesome,” she says. “What else have I missed, computer-wise?”

“Computer-wise,” says Sam, air-quoting. What a joke. Jess is a total hippie, barely uses her cell. Which is, well, probably one of the more notable changes if he thinks about it. He gets his iPhone out, shows her some of the stuff it can do: the camera, the music, the web. She seems relatively entertained by his demonstration, offering questions with an air of polite interest that feels increasingly familiar. He’s starting to wonder whether she might not have been all that fascinated by his adventures in computer science at school. 

“I could get you one,” he says. “A phone, like this. Or an iPad, that’s basically the same thing with a bigger screen.” He starts to stand up. “I’ve got one of those, somewhere…”

“It’s okay,” Jess says, dry. “Don’t worry about it. I mean. Who would I call, right?”

The joke lands flat, squashing most of the air out of their shared good mood. 

“Sorry,” Sam says. “I didn’t think.”

Jess sighs. “No, it’s my fault. I didn’t need to say that. It’s okay. But… look. I was thinking last night, about what you said, and I can see why you might not want me to contact my mom. But we need to talk about the long-term plan here, Sam. Unless you think there’s any chance that I’m just going to, to vanish back where I came from?”

“I don’t think so,” Sam says. 

“So… what, then?”

It’s a fair question, and one to which Sam still hasn’t really figured out his response. Time was, he’d have told her to stay in the bunker as the safest place. Now, after Kevin and after Dean’s stint with the hammer - after the Stines and after Lucifer, tucking himself up in Sam’s bed - he’s less certain of its inviolability. But Lucifer’s gone now, is out somewhere doing who knows what, and so the bunker still has to be ultimately a better bet than the outside world. After all. Sam has seen with his own two eyes how familiar the Devil is with Jess; and he’s got no doubt at all that Lucifer would do whatever it took to her if he thought it might help him to manipulate Sam.

“I think for the moment you need to stay here,” Sam says. “I, uh. At the moment especially, there’s some nasty stuff out there. Big bads.” He thinks about it, says the name. “Lucifer.”

“The _Devil?”_ Jess says, and Sam doesn’t want to scare her, but he really thinks that it’s important for her to stay. 

“Yeah. And he, uh. You really don’t want to attract his attention, Jess, he can just… he can pop you like a balloon just by clicking his fingers, he’s not, he doesn’t care. And knowing me and Dean makes you more vulnerable. So. It’s not. I’m not kidding with this stuff, all of it, it’s not just like ghosts and ghoulies and a creepy good time. It’s real. It kills people. You know that. It killed you.”

“Okay,” Jess says slowly. “I hear you. Okay.”

Sam’s surprised. He’d been gearing up for a longer fight. But he supposes she’s at a disadvantage here, shaken out of time and into a lifestyle she doesn’t really understand, and that might explain the absence of her familiar confident stubbornness, the typical steely rigidity with which she adheres to her point of view.

There’s a knock on Jess’s door, breaking into the silence. It’s Dean, carrying his duffel bag and wearing his boots and his thick jacket, the tough one that he doesn’t mind staining. He even has his Fed suit in its neat dry-cleaning bag. “I’m heading out,” he says unnecessarily. “Caught something up towards Oregon.”

“Right.” Every fibre of Sam’s body is conditioned to ask if Dean needs him to come along. He’s backup. That’s how they do. But Jess just woke up yesterday and she’s floundering and Sam can’t up and leave her. Dean knows that. That’s why he didn’t give Sam time to prepare.

“It’s good, Sam,” Dean says. “Nothing serious. Couple of vetala. I got it under control.” 

Sam nods, reluctantly, “Let me know if you need anything.” Dean grins at him, salutes, and spins into a military turn before he walks away. Before long they hear the clang of the outside door, and they’re alone. 

Sam’s still looking towards the hallway when Jess says, “I want you to teach me.”

“What?”

“Hunting. If it’s… you’re telling me that I’m not safe, and I guess I agree. So teach me how to handle myself. What do you guys do?”

“Jess, this isn’t…”

“Look, as nice an underground bunker as this is,” she says, “we have to find something to do with ourselves for the next… however long. And I want to learn. I think you owe me that.” 

He can’t argue, owes her that and substantially more, and so for the next six days that’s what they do: a crash course, hunting for beginners, designed just for Jess. Sam’s taught other people bits of it, of course. He’s sent Jody guidelines on particular monsters, outlined some crucial stuff for Kevin, even answered some questions for Claire. (He really hopes Jody never finds out about that.) But he’s never tried to put together a programme of study, and when he starts to approach it as an intellectual challenge he’s surprised to discover just how much he enjoys the task. 

He tries to balance the days between theory and practice, studying basic lore in the morning (monsters’ habitats and strategies and the best ways to deal with them) and moving on to more physical training in the afternoon. He shows Jess how to load and clean a gun before he takes her down to the firing range and lets her start practicing; spends other sessions having her work on a few basic warding spells. He also introduces her to the gym. It’s as old-fashioned as the rest of the bunker, ancient clanking metal equipment and a row of old leather punch-bags, supplemented with the newer stuff that Sam’s been ordering online over the past couple of years. Jess has always been fit. She runs and does yoga and she used to be on the cheerleading squad when she was in school. So this part of the training at least feels like familiar ground, which means she likes it, and soon they get into a routine of sharing a lunchtime workout every day. 

Sam’s bigger now than he was in Stanford. He was still coming through the last of his kid-skinny phase back then. He doesn’t really think about his body that much, though; not positively, anyway, not beyond its use as a tool of the job. There have been too many other entities inside alongside him for him to feel much ownership or affection toward it. Still, working out with Jess makes him start to look at it differently, the same way that after sleeping with Piper he spent the week feeling settled in his skin. Then, it had been Piper’s hands on his chest, his arms. “Nice,” she’d said. “Solid. Beautiful,” and Sam had glowed a little inside. Jess doesn’t say anything like that, certainly doesn’t touch, but Sam catches her more than once reflected in the wall-mirrors, checking out his shoulders as he does pull-ups on the central bar. It’s, uh. He’s still dealing with how feels about it, but if he’s honest with himself it does make him more conscious of the way he looks. He’s careful to shave every morning, digs the better shirts from the back of his wardrobe, is deliberate in wearing the green plaid he bought shopping with Jess.

He notices a rack of art supplies one day while he’s picking up groceries, and gets Jess a sketchbook so she can practice her sigils and spells. He buys a spare, too, thinking of sunflower paintings and ink-stained fingers, and that evening he looks up from his book to see her busily sketching. “What are you drawing?” he asks her, and she grins at him, embarrassed.

“Stay still.”

“Oh no,” Sam says, though he does stop moving. He wrinkles his nose. “Surely you can find a better subject.”

“Shut up,” she says. “You’ve got nice… your face has some beautiful angles, now you’re older. It makes it interesting to draw. You know?”

“I’ll do you after. If you’re lucky.”

“Oh my God.” She starts to laugh. “You could do it now, blindfold, without moving, and get the same effect.” 

Sam’s terrible drawing skills are indeed the stuff of legend. They were the target of a lot of badly-stifled snickering at the art class he’d ill-advisedly picked up shortly after meeting Jess. Not that he'd minded. The only reason he'd signed up was that he knew she was intending to do it, having heard her discussing her plans at the party where they were first introduced. Granted, he’d expected there to be more art history and less life drawing, but it’s hard to regret any of it when that was what got them together; making faces at one another over their easels as the latest, unlikeliest model of the moment disrobed in the centre of class. The first time they’d slept together, Jess had dropped her clothes dramatically before striking a double-jointed yoga pose on the floor in front of her bed. “Draw me like one of your French girls,” she’d said to him, before her muscles started quivering and she collapsed in a fit of the giggles.

“Your mouth is twitching,” Jess says to him now, breaking embarrassing into his unguarded thoughts.

“Sorry,” he says, surprised into a blush. He’d forgotten that knowing her was a two-way street.

She tuts at him, raises her eyebrow. “Les bonnes filles françaises restent calmes.”

\---

A couple days later, they’re done with their workout and out on the firing range and Sam watches with admiration as Jess (clad in ear-defenders) rattles off rounds into the paper targets. She’s already so much more confident than she was at the start of the week, her shots hitting the targets with impressive accuracy and clustering in the kill zones he’s taught her more impressively still. Once she’s done and he’s inspecting the perforated cutouts, he nods to himself before telling her, “Great job. You’re really getting good.”

“Well, thanks, prof.” Jess seems to be weighing a thought; hesitates, offers it. “Maybe I can join you guys out on the hunt, next time.”

Sam is shocked. “No! Jess. No way. Absolutely not.”

“Oh, fuck’s sake,” says Jess, and all the happy comfortable buffer they’ve built this last week starts to shiver and crack. “What’s the point of teaching me this stuff if you aren’t ever planning to let me use it? I’m learning so that I can get out, Sam, so that I can look after myself.”

“It’s not _safe,”_ Sam says. His head is spinning with images of his friends, collateral damage: Kevin and Pamela, burnt-eyed and screaming. Charlie in a bathtub, steeped in blood. Sarah, choking on invisible blades on the floor of an ugly motel room. That can’t happen to Jess.

“That’s bullshit, Sam. You don’t own me. You don’t get to decide what I do. Just because some God I’ve never spoken to magicked me back to life - because he thought you’d like it - doesn’t mean anything. I’m a person. I’m real.”

“I know,” Sam says, agonized. “And I’m sorry. But I can’t let you leave. Jess. You already died once.”

“I might as well be dead right now.”

“Jess -”

“I mean it. This isn’t living, however nice you try to make it.” 

She picks up the gun, grabs a bottle of oil and a cloth from the table outside the door as she leaves. Then she shuts herself in her bedroom for the rest of the day, leaving to Sam rattle around the bunker discomfited and alone. He sends Dean a text to see how he’s doing on the case, gets back something short and sarcastic. He cooks dinner, leaving most of it in a Tupperware in case Jess comes looking. Eventually, he goes to bed, trying for an early night; but it’s hopeless. It takes him hours to fall asleep, his brain still so-helpfully sorting through his long list of losses, the dead. When he does drift off, it’s with the flicker of Brady’s face on the back of his eyelids, the demon inside him fizzling out of existence as Sam’s best friend fell dead to the ground. 


	3. Chapter 3

Sam opens his eyes. His room is enveloped in the uniform blank darkness that the bunker falls into whenever anybody turns out the lights. The little lamp in the corner that he uses for a nightlight is glowing, peach-yellow, like it always does. He checks his phone. 5am. So why is he awake? Something startled him out of sleep, and he can half-hear the echo of it. The clang of the outside door.

He’s on his feet in seconds, skidding down the corridor, around the corner to where the door of Jess’s room is open wide. Everything is gone: the meagre clothing she’s been living in, her notebooks and sketchbook and the gun she was practicing with last night. Shit.

Dean took the car on the hunt, of course, so Sam has to fire up the junky old truck that he keeps running in case he needs to go out on his own. It’s ugly but it runs well and he likes the anonymity it gives. You don’t always wanna be rolling up somewhere in a muscle car. Sam doesn’t, at least. 

Thank God, Jess hasn’t gone far. He heads in the opposite direction to the one that they’ve always driven in, finding her trudging along with her backpack at the side of the road. As the truck slows beside her, she refuses for a long while to look around; but he pulls over a little in front of her where she’d have to change her path to avoid him, and she stops just before she gets there, waiting quiet with her bag on her shoulders. He opens the door. “Come on.”

Jess’s shoulders slump. She walks forward the few paces to bring her up level with him, looks at him with some resignation and slides without speaking into the car. She’s fuming as he drives them back home, silent but rigid with the same angry tension that Sam is familiar with from negotiating Dean’s blackest moods. When they get to the bunker he pulls over, turns off the engine, and they sit both staring out of the windshield into the trees. It seems a good a place to talk as any.

“Jess,” Sam says. “Please. I need you to take me seriously on this. You can’t… it isn’t safe for you, like specifically you, in the outside world.”

“And why not?” Jess seems to have given up on the polite compliance. “I know there’s bad shit out here, Sam, but you go out and it seems from what you’ve said like a shitload of other people do too. You let your Mom go off to - to find herself or whatever. Why not me?”

“Because Lucifer fucking _knows_ you, Jess, okay?” Sam says. “He’s been. He came to me… okay, so eight years ago Lucifer was caged up, right? In Hell. But I let him out. By accident, but it was my fault. And I didn’t, Dean and I didn’t really know what that was gonna mean, but we were afraid and we were angry at each other and we split up. And while I was on my own Lucifer came to me, I was in bed sleeping and Jess, he came _as you_. Get it? Five years after you died, I was asleep, and I opened my eyes and there you were next to me in some, some slinky nightdress and you looked me in the eyes and told me that you missed me and that it was my fault you died. Because it was, Jess, it was _my fault_ , not just because I dreamed about it happening for months, but because if you’d never met me then you’d never have died at all.”

“I came to you eight years ago?” Jess says. And then, “You saw me die in a dream?”

“Seven years,” Sam says, because he’s still not ready to deal with the rest of it. “And no. It wasn’t you that came to me, that’s the point. It was just Lucifer, trying to fuck me up. To make me say yes to him.”

“Yes to what?”

“Angels don’t, uh. So. Brady was possessed by a demon, right? And demons can just, they’ll just take over your body. No yes or no. An angel has to be invited in. You gotta let them in. And Lucifer wanted my body. So he came to me looking like you.”

“Because he knew that you were still,” Jess pauses, and then, “hung up on me,” she says, just as Sam says,

“Still in love with you.”

Fuck.

“O-kay,” says Jess. 

“It was seven years ago,” Sam says, lame.

“Did it work?”

Sam’s still so flustered over his blunder that it takes him a moment to understand what she means.

“The possession,” she prompts him. “With Lucifer. Did you let him in?”

“Yes,” Sam says. “Well, no. Not the way that he wanted. Not then. But eventually, uh. Yes. But it was on purpose, it was part of a plan.”

“Wow,” she says. “That’s. Wow. You had Lucifer inside you? What was that like?”

Sam doesn’t know how to begin to answer that question. Terrible, to see your own hands slaughter the people you love. Dean’s face, battered and bleeding. Cas exploding in a fog of guts. Wonderful, to feel the power burning through your veins. Hideous, disgusting, repulsive to succumb to the joy of it, battling your own body as it revels in its unwonted power.

“Not good,” he says at last. His ears are buzzing, the colours in the world around him starting to fade to grey. 

“You’re looking pale,” Jess says, her voice unexpectedly loud beside him. “Sam? Sam, are you okay?”

“Yes,” he says, clutching the fingers of his burnt right hand around the wheel. It’s healed a lot since the day Jess got there but the skin’s still shiny, tight enough that the movement strains and hurts. A wave of nausea rolls up from his stomach and he fights it down with a substantial effort of will. He needs to be inside, somewhere he can throw up if he has to. “Please,” he says. “Please come back inside, okay?”

For a miracle, she does, shocked enough maybe by the implications of what he told her to welcome the opportunity to retreat and reflect. “We can talk about this more,” he says when they get downstairs, “but I just need a minute. So please, just. Stay here.” 

“Okay,” she says, and he makes a dash to his room, bends over with his hands on the sink and feels himself sliding out of control. Fuck. He runs the water, splashes it cold on his face. Get a grip, Sam. But he can’t, quite, is shivery-shaky with adrenaline and fear. He’s not sure what it is that started him off; the unwelcome reminder of Lucifer’s grace inside him, or the fear that he’d revealed something too much of himself to Jess, that maybe he’s closer than he’d originally wanted to admit to that sad guy still hung up on the sweetheart who died, lying in bed and dreaming of her and wishing her back beside him. 

He’s still labouring through his deep breathing exercises when the door scrapes open behind him, and he looks up to see Jess’s face in the corner of the mirror. He turns around. She’s wearing some grey track pants that she ordered from ASOS and the Smurf t-shirt again, short enough to leave a wide strip of her stomach exposed.

“Can I,” says Jess, and comes forward to perch on the bed; looks at him expectantly until he pries his fingers off the sink and joins her. She turns towards him, looks right into his eyes. It’s a lot, when Sam’s still feeling jumpy, but he tries to keep himself straight. “I’m sorry that I scared you,” she says. “I know you’re just trying to do the right thing.”

“Yeah,” he says. She won’t stop looking at his face. He breaks eye contact, looks down, looks up and she’s still gazing, scrutinising his features like she’s trying to read his mind. It makes him feel trapped, tangled up in his own self-consciousness. “Jess,” he says, and she shifts towards him on the bed, puts her hand on his knee. She leans forward, looks up at him serious.

“What you said. About, uh. The way you felt about me. Or feel about me, I don’t. Um.”

Sam nods, afraid to speak, unsure where this is going.

Jess curls her fingers around his knee a little tighter. “I just wanted to say that. If you wanted. I’ve been thinking. I would.”

“... What?” Sam says, stupid.

Jess’s hand slides up his thigh. She moves closer. She smells of flowers, freesia and lily and rose. The scent judders Sam back in time, skewering him with a bolt that runs right through him, to the heart of that kid who first fell for Jess. How can she... it doesn't make sense that she smells that way. Is it cologne? It's not their washing powder or the cheap shampoo Sam bought her. It’s a stupid detail. It shouldn’t matter. But the how of it catches on his mind like a splinter.

“Hey,” Jess says, lifts her other hand up to his face; leans forward and kisses him. The immediacy of her mouth on his helps Sam pull free of his thoughts, bringing him up to the surface where he can feel without thinking too hard. This. They were always good at this. And Jess’s taste, so familiar that it’s like she’s never been gone.

He shifts back on the bed, against the pillows, and Jess moves with him, climbing to straddle his hips. She puts a hand on his waist, leans over, her hair falling around their faces and the sweet floral scent of her in his nose, his mouth. It judders him, again, and the scene splits around him, Jess’s face morphing into something paler, flat. 

“I’ve wanted this, Sam,” she says in a cut-glass accent, English vowels and it’s Toni and Sam’s under her spell again. He clutches at her sides, not sure if he’s trying to pull her onto or off him, but she takes it for enthusiasm and moves forward to mouth over his neck. She says something into his skin which might be, “I love you,” and he tries to pull back from her, uncertain, as she slides her hands under his shirt. It feels like the room is getting smaller and larger, the walls bowing elastic under some external weight, Sam the fixed point in the centre and he can’t get away, can’t move.

“Always,” Jess says, “it was always,” and it’s Lucifer’s voice now, the touch on Sam’s belly scaly-clawed and sharp. He gasps, struggling, fighting for breath, arching backward and Jess doesn’t stop touching him, her hands sliding determined down towards his pants. “Baby,” she tells him, “I got you.”

“Wait,” he says, and she says, “it’s okay, I want this,” kisses him quiet and moves her hand lower, down to cup over his cock. He’s still soft, of course. “Oh,” she says and stops abruptly, drawing back her hand.

Sam gulps in air, his head swimming, his hands gripping tight into the blankets, his feet scrabbling against the mattress, pushing away. 

“Sam?” says Jess and the sound shakes him out of his head, loosening his tongue.

“I don’t,” he says, all in a rush, “I don’t, please, I’m sorry, I can’t, this isn’t. I don’t want to. I can’t.”

Jess jumps up, steps back, raises her hands in front of her. “Sorry,” she says. “Shit, Sam. Sorry, I got the wrong idea.”

Sam nods. He’s trying hard to keep it together. He closes his lips as tight as he can, nods again. “It’s okay.”

She steps towards him, hand outstretched, and he flinches back from her. “Sorry,” she says again. “Fuck. I’m gonna. I’ll leave you alone.”

It takes a long time for Sam to will himself calmer, a long time. Several hours. He lies on the bed and watches the blades of the ceiling fan rotate. Round. Round. Like the blades of a helicopter. He imagines putting his hand up between them and the blade slicing fast and the whole thing severing clean at the wrist. It wouldn’t be clean, of course. There’d be spray. But that’s wrong, too. It wouldn’t slice anything. The blades are wood, bamboo. 

An iron fan in a five-pointed star, gridded over, high above his head. Beyond it, Bobby’s yard of rusted cars. The trees. 

A nursery and a mobile spinning over his head, a dark figure with yellow eyes. Blood in his mouth.

He’s called out of his trance by the growl of his stomach, griping and empty. When he pulls himself to his feet, his blood rushes up and sets him dizzy and staggering. He doesn’t usually get this reaction without a good twelve hours of fasting. How long has he been down there? It’s impossible to tell. 

When he leaves his room he finds the corridors dark. He doesn’t switch the lights on, just pads on bare feet through the shadowy halls. As he gets close to the main suite of rooms he hears music coming from the kitchen, tinny like it’s being played through a phone. When Sam reaches the doorway he can see that he’s right. Dean’s iPhone is in the middle of the table and AC/DC is blaring out of it, metallic-thin. There are bottles, beer and whisky, lined up in rows. Jess has an open El Sol in her hand and she’s leaning forward, laughing up at something Dean’s said. Dean is leaning back, arms waving expansive, legs spread. He looks comfortable. He winks at Jess.

It’s a warm bubble of good feeling and light and noise that Sam, in the cold silent corridor, is quite outside. Sometimes he thinks it would be easy just to evaporate, to disintegrate with the blink of an eye into infinitesimal atoms of dust. Billie’s offered it. (He’s not sure that might not be his wish.)

“Hey,” says Jess, then, catching sight of him, and he’s forced forward into the kitchen to join them after all. 

Jess is drunk, he realises pretty fast. Her cheeks are pink and her pupils just a little too wide; and when she talks her words are carefully separate, emphasised with a weight on each one so that she doesn’t slur them together. “I wanted to apologise,” she says. “For earlier. I didn’t.”

“It’s okay,” Sam says quickly, with a glance at his brother. Dean’s right there. Surely she wouldn’t. (Maybe she already has.) 

“No,” Jess says, and shaking her head, the movement drawn out, ebbing down slowly until she’s swaying a little side-to-side. “No, I was, it wasn’t okay. I pushed you.”

“Really,” Sam says, desperate to shut her down. “It’s fine.”

“You’ve been so. You’ve taught me all this, stuff,” Jess says, flings out her hand and tips a bottle. Deann catches it, steadies it with the tip of his finger. She puts her palm on the table, pushes upright and Dean is watching as she wobbles, takes a second to scrape back his chair and stands up quiet behind. “And then I. I won’t run away, Sam, I promise. I know you care about me and, uh.” A half-step sideways, a dangerous dip of her knee. “I just wanted you to know that I. About you.” She steps toward him, then, but her feet are tangled between the chair and the table and she trips as she moves. 

“Alright, gorgeous,” says Dean, and catches her with an easy arm around her waist. Her mouth, open with the shock of her stumble, swoops into a smile and she turns to look up at him, their faces close, perfect profiles in easy alignment. They’d only have to move forward a fraction for their lips to touch.

Sam flushes all over with an unexpected fury. His throat tightens, his eyes blurring. “Get off her,” he says.

Dean’s almost laughing at him. “Seriously, Sam?”

“Get _off_ ,” says Sam, and steps forward, fast and unexpected and up in their personal space, grabs Jess’s upper arm and jerks her away from Dean’s hand. She’s not laughing, now, is looking at him wide-eyed and Sam can’t, he can’t deal with this right now.

“Go to bed, Jessica,” says Dean. It’s his most forceful, scariest tone and damn fucking right Jess goes. She’s barely left the room when Dean starts in. “What the fuck was that?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t -”

“Chrissakes, Sam, I was trying to be friendly. What do you want me to do? You’re telling me that she’s here, that I gotta deal with her here in my home, indefinitely, and what do you want me to do? I thought you’d be pleased that I was being nice to the kid!” 

“Yeah, Dean. She’s a kid.”

“Point being…?”

“You don’t touch her like that!”

“I wasn't touching her like anything! What the fuck is eating you, man? I don’t wanna bang your fucking teenage girlfriend, Sam!”

That last jab hits Sam like a slap to the face. “That’s not what’s eating me,” he says.

“Well,” Dean says. “That’s not what she made it sound like.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sam feels sick. What did Jess say about him, about what happened this morning? Dean already thinks Sam’s sex life is pathetic, disgusting. And Jess is right. He must have done something, to make her think he wanted it. He _knows_ he did. He’s been flirting with her shamelessly for the whole past week. But he didn’t mean… he hears Toni’s voice. _Was it good for you?_

“What the fuck ever, man,” Dean says; and steps back and out of the conversation, just like that, disengaged. Boiling and humiliated and impotent, Sam is left behind. “I only came back for a change of clothes. I got something else lined up in Louisiana. So.” He walks past Sam, stops in the doorway and speaks without turning his head. “And I heard from Mom, by the way. She’s fine.”

That stings, the implication that Sam should have been asking after her. He’s been trying to give Mom her space. Worse, though, is the realisation that Dean’s going to leave already, when Sam has been counting on him to stay. “Don’t go,” he wants to tell his brother; but it isn’t so easy. A hunt means people are dying out there. Who’s Sam to keep Dean away?

Alone in the bunker with Jess, things are newly awkward. They try to keep up the practicing but it’s different now, distant. He doesn’t join her in the gym any more, tries to leave her some personal space seeing that he’s successfully persuaded her to close herself up here with him for the foreseeable future. That said, he also doesn’t feel like he can leave without resolving the issues. He needs to make sure she’s not going to make a run for it. And after her early morning escape, he finds himself startling awake at night, positive it’s happened again. More often than not, he ends up pacing the corridors, checking the wards obsessively, inventorying the guns.

It’s not only the fear of Jess escaping that keeps him sleepless. The whole humiliating business in his bedroom, coming as it did so soon on the heels of Toni’s incursion into his mind, has stirred up some of the darker memories Sam tries his best to suppress. It’s skewed his unsteady sense of reality a little further sideways, made him feel vulnerable in a way that brings him back to the Cage. It doesn’t help any that Lucifer is out there, out free like Sam never put him away. That’s one of the biggest things that Sam tries not to think about. A hundred eighty years in hell, and he kept Lucifer caged for what, six years up here? He knows he owed a big fucking debt but it feels like a pretty bad bargain. Hell for eternity, Sam’s soul for everybody’s safety? Sure. But this, the mess they’re in now? He doesn’t quite know.

There’s one way to make it better again, at least, which is to put the son of a bitch back where he came from. To that end, Sam starts to work through the Men of Letters’ lore on Lucifer. They have books in this place that Bobby could never even have dreamed of. There must be something in here that can help.

He’s three levels down in one of the more obscure archive rooms, combing through for anything on the Cage or the Lightbringer, when Jess appears at the door, surprising him. He wouldn’t have thought she’d be able to track him down here: he’s never brought her along with him down to this level before. Something about her unexpected presence makes him nervous. He wonders how many of his other private behaviours she’s observed unnoticed.

“What do you keep in here?” Jess advances through the shelving, turns a curious eye over the ranked masses of books.

“Just books,” Sam says. “A mixture. Some of the older stuff I don’t want to put out front.”

She stretches to pull one out from the shelf above her head: a small, squat, blood-red volume whose pages are edged in black. Her fingers caress the spine, trace over the tooled leather markings. “Is this one important?”

It’s nasty, is what it is. Sam translated the first three spells once, an exercise in the language as much as anything else, but he stopped when he came to an ingredients list that included a baby’s liver, a fingertip, and the hides of three rabbits skinned alive. The stuff he saw of it was serious dark magic, powerful and unpleasant and the kind of thing that he’s glad is sitting here on these shelves behind a solid steel door instead of floating out in the world to be co-opted and set loose. 

“No, it’s not important,” he says.

“Can I borrow it, then?”

“It’s written in Farsi, Jess,” he says. “Unless you took some language classes you never mentioned, there’s no point.” 

“What about this one?”

With some unerring instinct, she’s picked up another black book. This one is about the violent uses of telepathic control, which is close enough to possession that Sam’s found himself drawn back to consult it several times. The stuff it talks about is enough to give him nightmares - has definitely been responsible for more than one night’s lost sleep. It tells stories of men and women whose identities are wiped clean overnight, or who wake up with their thoughts rewritten and another person’s dreams in their head. It explains how to charm a victim so that they will destroy themselves without blinking once their task is done. And it talks about the inevitable slow degradation of a brain reprogrammed too many times, connection circuits in the brain burning out as they are rerouted and overwritten. The idea of serious brain injury scares Sam witless. His brain is ally to his soul, trapped together in their prison of flesh. Lose it, and he’s on his own in a body that doesn’t feel like his.

“I’m not sure that any of the books in here are a good idea,” he says. “I’ve got a ton of stuff out on the shelves in the library. You can look at those.”

Jess steps up close to him, near enough that the soft curve of her chest is almost touching him. “Come on, Sam,” she says. “I’m not a child.” Her grey-blue eyes meet his. “You know that.”

“Stop it,” Sam says, clipped. 

Jess relaxes, steps back, rolls her eyes. “Fine. Whatever.” She picks up her hair in her hand, gathers it as if in a ponytail and then lets it drop. “We can at last be friendly, right? What are you looking for? Can I help out?”

For some reason Sam wouldn’t quite be ready to explain, he doesn’t want Jess to look at the research he’s compiling on Lucifer. So he diverts her onto the British Men of Letters instead. He's been going through the old procedural archives looking for records of any contact from overseas. It's not the most fascinating work but it's uncontroversial, easy.

That's what he thinks, anyway, but as soon as they've spread out at the table Jess starts in with her questions again. “So these Brits,” she says. “Dean said that they tortured you.”

Wow. That’s a jolt. Dean hasn’t asked Sam about what happened in the basement once, and yet apparently he’s happy to discuss it in detail with Jess? 

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Sam says.

“Come on, baby,” she says. The nickname, sweet when she means it, sets his teeth on edge. “It’s good to talk. You used to tell me everything.” That’s a lie, though. He didn’t tell her anything, not the things that mattered, the real stuff. This is what’s real.

She shuffles her chair a little closer towards him, turns so that he can’t escape her, leans in. Sam keeps his eyes focused on the papers in front of him. Operational report. The sheet is type-written. The machine must have been broken because there’s something wrong with the ‘S’ key, the letter riven in two by a blank horizontal line.

“Sam,” says Jess, and she puts her hand on his shoulder. She’s close enough that he can hear her breathe; smell the same sweet flowery perfume that unsettled him so badly before. The memory pushes him close enough to panic that he snaps at her, spins around.

“I can’t talk about this right now, okay?”

Jess raises her eyebrows, moves away. “Whatever,” she says. “I was only trying to help. It’s fine. We can just talk shop.”

So that’s what they do, the conversation stilted and formal as they work together for the rest of the day. There are a few scattered references to external branches in the papers Sam’s extracted, although there’s nothing concrete or specific about the Brits. Jess does find a suggestive reference in a bunch of material from the 1920s to what sounds like a possible Men of Letters branch in Mexico, which Sam notes down carefully for future follow-up. Apart from that, it’s just a series of long administrative papers which demand an exhaustive combing through regardless. The grist of the job.

Sometime around midnight Jess yawns, stands up and stretches and tells him that she’s tapping out. He gives her a half-hour to settle in for the night, then abandons the folders he’s been working through on the library table and heads back to the deep archives to dig further into the Lucifer stuff. He finds a bunch more disturbing spellbooks (he’s wondering if they’re a single collection that the Men of Letters acquired, makes a note to check on it) but nothing really on Lucifer that he feels he can use. It feels like no time at all before he hears a noise from the upper corridor and has to hurry back to the library where he finds Jess eating breakfast, already showered and changed.

“I was just in my room,” he says, unnecessary.

She frowns at him, “Sure. Okay.”

They go on like that for the next several days, Sam working double shifts day and night on the Men of Letters and Lucifer, trying not to let Jess know. The lack of sleep is making him jittery. He dozes off at odd moments, in the archives or in the library; wakes up gasping with his head against the shelves and the lingering sense of a departed presence, of somebody walking out of the room. Sometimes he hears laughter, voices whispering, but when he checks on Jess she’s always working quietly, focused on the papers in front of her. It’s when he’s not looking at her that she slips away, reshuffling the books in the library in patterns that he can’t discern.

He finds himself checking the shelves obsessively, noting down in a coded hand the patterns of her movement, racking his brains for the significance. He wonders if it would be possible to use a library to cast a spell. It sounds plausible. Put the wrong books in the right places and you could hit the right magical resonance, harness the power of every volume and bend it to your will. He jots it down in another of his several notebooks, adds the topic of book-based magic to the growing tasklist for his nocturnal research.

Sam’s so busy untangling conspiracies that he doesn’t always notice the passing of time. Dean texts him and he doesn’t see the message until two days later, by which time his brother has followed up with several more. Rather than read them in detail, Sam sends back a reply that contains three happy emojis and four exclamation points. Everything is under control.

“We’re out of food,” Jess says to him one day. “We need to go on a grocery run.”

Sam thinks about it. There’s no question of him leaving her here with all of his research materials. That might be part of her plan.. No, she’d have to come with. He doesn’t much fancy keeping an eye on her, out in public; and the very idea of it, the outside, seems dizzying. It’s too unpredictable.

“We’re okay,” he tells her. “There’s cans in the larder. We’re fine.”

Jess looks at him anxiously but doesn’t make any objections. Maybe she thinks that Sam’s cracking up. (Maybe she isn’t really hungry at all.)

That night or maybe the one after, she brings him his laptop, suggests a Netflix break. It doesn’t go so well. They’ve reached the Arctic episode of Planet Earth and it’s horrifying. Sam can’t believe he forgot. The polar bear, starved thin and gored bloody, laying down on the ice to die. And a penguin chick, tiny, trampled to death in its would-be mothers’ frantic competitive fray. The child crushed by too much desperate affection; it’s a stifling image, catching at Sam’s claustrophobic despair. 

“Fuck, that was brutal,” Jess says as the credits roll. Sam doesn’t want to talk about it, but then it feels like nowadays he never wants to talk at all. It’s not very sociable. So he nods, makes a noise, agrees.

“Young male Adelie penguins,” she says, “have sex with the dead bodies of females. Did you know that? They don’t realise, because a dead penguin and a compliant female look so much alike.” Her tone is bright and informative. She’s laughing. “Terrible, right?”

It doesn’t seem all that funny to Sam. He might be dead but he isn’t going to be compliant. He’s not going to lie down and take it. He isn’t. He won’t.

The next time he lets himself attempt to sleep in his bed, he can’t stop thinking about the way that he looks. Dead. Available. Birds appear to him in his dreams, staring beady-eyed. One of them talks like Jess. “Lie down. Play nice.”

He’s making coffee to try and keep himself upright when Dean walks into the kitchen. “Hey, Sammy,” he says, “You get my messages or what?”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “Sorry. I’ve just been busy.”

Dean judders to a halt in front of him, his eyes searching Sam’s face. Sam’s not sure what he’s looking for. “Jesus, Sam. You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look rough, man. Kind of, uh. Skinny.” Dean lifts a finger, brushes it over the bristles on Sam’s cheeks. “Going for the hobo beard.”

“Oh.” It’s true. He hasn’t had much time to shave. And now Dean mentions it, he’s not sure when he last ate anything. The canned soups in the larder lost their appeal pretty quickly, too salty and thin. And heating them took valuable energy Sam needed to focus. So. “We need some, uh. Some food. Sorry. I know you just got in.”

Dean blinks, then walks over to open the fridge. He whistles, low. “Dude, you’re not wrong. What happened?”

“Just busy,” Sam says. “Trying to figure out this stuff with, with Lucifer, you know, gotta get that sorted.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. He stands up, frowning. “When was the last time you left the house?”

“A while,” Sam says vaguely. He isn’t sure precisely how long Dean’s been gone. “Anyway. I just gotta, um.”

“Keeping busy, right?” Dean looks grim.


	4. Chapter 4

That night Sam doesn’t go down to the archives, but he gets out of bed at half-past one to go check the wards. He’s quiet, barefoot, so he doesn’t think Dean will hear him; even so, he’s careful to avoid his brother’s room, looking at that particular corridor from a safe position at one end before crossing the length of the building to check it again from the other side. Everything is fine, all well, until he gets downstairs to the archive rooms where he’d been working earlier that day. Somebody has left a light on in one of them, the bare bulb projecting a white-yellow rectangle onto the hallway floor. As soon as he gets in there, he recognises it as the store with the dark magic books that Jess had found so fascinating. He half-expects to find that the Persian book has been taken - but when he goes to look he finds the carved leather of its cover still sat quiet on the shelf. So. Maybe not. After all, it’s possible that he left the light on himself.

He picks up the book, just to look at it, and is startled when a sheaf of loose pages flutter to the floor. That didn’t. He picked it up during that conversation with Jess and nothing moved at all. This is a bound volume. They shouldn’t just come free. But when he looks, the thread joining the whole first section has frayed and snapped. He stoops to pick up the dropped sheets, sifting through them to try and figure out whether she took anything, but the only way to know for sure is to read the thing; so he takes the book back to his bedroom with his New Persian grammar and tries.

It’s a bad idea. The book is just as horrible as he remembers, full of vicious detail about the brutal effects that its curses can impose. Flesh unpeeling off the bone. Blistered faces. Shredded limbs. As he reads, all the bits of the bodies Sam's picturing detach themselves from the pages, dancing macabre through his mind. He lifts his own hand, turning the page, and watches with horror as the meat of it liquefies and drips away, fat droplets of gore splattering down onto the paper and the structure of his fingers emerging skeletal from under the skin. The sight’s enough to make him exclaim aloud; but when he looks again, his hand is whole, the white pages of the text unblemished. He closes the book.

He waits until Jess is in the gym doing her workout, checking on her surreptitious from the doorway before he goes to find Dean. His brother is in the kitchen with a fresh set of shopping bags, unloading meat and cheese and eggs into the fridge. 

“Brought you some lunch, Sammy,” and Dean indicates a stack of polystyrene containers. The smell of savoury cheese and bacon triggers a wave of nausea that Sam fights to swallow down.

“Can I talk to you?” he says. 

Dean puts the last carton of eggs into the refrigerator, grabs a fork from the drawer and sits down at the table. He opens up a brunch box, digs into it. The burnt meat smell unrolls across the table. “Shoot,” he says.

Sam breathes in through his mouth, carefully stoppering his nose. “I’m not sure Jess is… I’m not sure she’s really herself.”

Dean frowns. “Could say the same thing about Mom. People come back fucked up. Or just. They’re not the way you thought they were. Sorry, kid.” He forks a generous serving of egg into his mouth.

“No,” Sam says. “Not like that. Not… not metaphorically. Like. I’m really not sure it’s Jess.” 

Dean looks at him and Sam gazes back, mutely desperate. Even when things get really awful between them, he can usually rely on Dean to extend him the benefit of the doubt. He did it in Broward County, upward of a hundred times; sat there and listened as Sam tried to explain the living nightmare he was cycling through and said “okay, what do we do?”

“Okay,” is what Dean says now, through his mouthful, slow and careful. “I’ll bite. Who do you think it is?”

Sam knows exactly who he thinks it is. But in the instant he’s paralysed, unable to speak the name. Names can be powerful enchantments, summonings, and he can’t shake the knowledge that Jess (not-Jess) is lurking around some corner, close enough to overhear.

“I don’t know,” he hears himself say.

Sam can _see_ the belief evaporating out of Dean, just like that, a puff of vapour and gone. “Sammy,” he says and his voice sounds tired. Poor Dean. He’s fresh off a hunt and Sam’s hassling him because he can’t handle his shit. “I think you need to get outside. You know?” He looks around, gestures at the coffee cups stacked on every surface. Yeah. Maybe Sam could have cleared up a little. “You need your vitamin D, right?” He grimaces, a smile. “It’ll stunt your growth.”

That’s a joke. Sam’s not stunted. He’s a weed.

“I can keep an eye on Jess,” Dean says. “I know you’re worried about her. But I’m back. So just… take a walk or something. Go for a run. You love that shit.”

“Okay. Yeah. Okay.”

Sam puts on all of his running gear: the shiny polyester shorts that Dean thinks are dorky, his best dark green vest and the shoes which come from a proper running shop in Kansas City. He even brushes his hair back into a ponytail, which really means business. But when he climbs the stairs up to the outside door, he discovers he’s unable to go. Each additional tread on the staircase feels like a weight being settled on his chest; so that by the time he gets to the top, he can hardly breathe. His lungs are trapped, confined, his ribs fused thick and bulky and heavy inside.

He waits for a long time, looking at the outside door; gets as close as putting his hand on the handle, feeling the chill of the air seeping through. He can't do it. Instead he turns and hurries back through the corridors to his room, his steps speeding up as he nears the relative safety of the threshold. Inside, he strips back down to nudity, pulls on his track pants and shrouds himself in a hoodie before climbing into bed. His heart is pounding so hard that his whole body is shaking, the bed frame itself seeming to judder in time with the beat of his blood. He starts up his laptop, fires up a documentary, but it turns out to be another mistake. Everything he starts to watch makes him more uneasy. He has a panic attack in the middle of Blue Planet, overempathising with the blind white sea creatures right down under the ocean depth. He knows the feeling intimately, the weight of water pressing down on him, huge and dark and enormous, such a long way up to the light. 

He's not sure how long he's been in there when his phone lights up, the vibration startling him. He doesn't answer, but it buzzes with a text message not long after. It's Dean. “ _U back?”_ Sam just tells him yes. It’s easier than the truth.

He comes back into the library to find Dean and Jess sitting catty-corner at one of the tables, talking in low voices. When Jess catches sight of him, she stops, and the two of them turn to look around as Sam pads into the room.

“How you doing, champ?” Dean says, with a big false smile like Sam’s a kid to be appeased. He pushes the chair next to him backward, away from the table. “Come join us.”

Sam does, eying Jess suspiciously. He doesn’t like the idea that they’ve been here, discussing him, what he’s been up to while Dean’s been gone. Conspiring. He needs Dean to be on his side.

“Good run?” says Jess, clear and bright. She’s taunting him. She knows he didn’t go out, that he can’t go outside anymore. Sam doesn’t give her the satisfaction of an answer.

“So, Metallica, huh?” says Dean after a silence.

Jess smiles at him gratefully and says, “Oh, yeah. My brother was obsessed. And you know how these things go, younger siblings want to be like the older ones, so.”

Sam had thought Jess’s brother - Mac, he was called Mac - was an indie kid. He remembers Jess showing him photos of them both as teens, Mac with a long emo haircut dyed an awkward blonde, a big khaki cargo jacket and baggy jeans that trailed long threads behind. Jess in a Green Day t-shirt, leaning into the picture as Mac gazed out, blank-eyed. But. He guesses that must have been a later phase.

Jess has made dinner. Dean makes a big point of it, shaking out his napkin, tucking it around his neck. He’s trying to put everybody at ease but Sam’s too uneasy-queasy for it to just go away. The dinner is spaghetti in tomato sauce. _Puttanesca_ , Jess says. Whore sauce, says Dean, and laughs. What, Sammy? I read. Sam takes his fork and spins it and the noodles coil around it, all of them wrapping up tight like a nest. Tomato pasta. That’s safe. It’s only vegetables. But when he puts it in his mouth, the strands start untangling, wriggling like live things, like worms. He almost gags on the mouthful before he swallows it but he holds his breath, drinks his beer, forces it down his throat. Jess is watching him from across the table, intent. 

“Delicious,” Sam says, and spends the rest of the meal carefully pushing it to one side of his plate, squashing it down into the smallest space where he can make it fit. Then he feels bad for them, the noodles. It’s not nice to be squashed. He starts to separate them out into nice straight lines.

“Aren’t you going to eat it?” says Jess, and Sam says “sorry” without even thinking, too fast.

Dean looks between them. “Your loss, Sammy,” he says eventually. He reaches over and pulls Sam’s plate towards him, shoves his own empty one back towards Sam, then leans over and grabs a handful of the salad Jess set out in a big wooden bowl. He drops it onto the plate in front of Sam. “There you go, Sasquatch. Eat your greens,” he says.

That wasn’t nice of Sam, not to eat the dinner that Jess made, and later in the evening he goes into her bedroom to say sorry for what he did. The light is on and the door a little open, so when he knocks and she doesn’t answer he steps in anyway. She’s asleep on the bed, face down, still clothed and on top of the blankets with a book splayed open beside her. The cover’s tilted towards him and Sam can see that it isn’t anything to do with lore, a bright-coloured paperback. A novel. Dean must have lent it to her. Sam reads the hardback stuff that the Men of Letters bought, or he reads on his Kindle. A lot of the time, fiction makes him uneasy. Dean’s the one who buys that kind of book.

He looks around the bedroom. Jess’s presence can be felt in the pencils stuffed in a pot on the bedside shelving, the hair ties scattered atop the bedside drawers. And beside him, on the desk, her sketchbook, the pages spilling out across the surface of the wood. Sam extends a finger, drags the closest one away from its fellows. The surface is covered with intricate diagrams, pentagrams with Enochian lettering that aren’t any demon trap he knows. Where has she got this from? Sam never taught her this. He reaches for another sheet. This one is covered in other diagrams, the occasional lettering not dissimilar to the Farsi that Jess can’t read. Even the shape of the spells seems unfriendly. You get a sense for that stuff, after you’ve done enough of it. The sharp triangle points of these symbols set Sam’s teeth on edge.

“I’ve been practicing,” Jess says. He’s not sure how long she’s been awake and watching him. “How’d I do?”

“Looks good,” Sam says.

In bed that night Sam’s sheets feel like they’re frozen, a thin scratchy layer of ice against his clothes. He half-expects his skin to stick to the cotton, cling and burn like a wet tongue on a frozen pole. He gets up three times to retrieve more blankets from the cupboard, puts on two sweaters, before he’s anything close to warm.

\---

He’s waiting for Dean to leave them again, leave Sam and Jess or the thing with Jess’s face on going round and round in the bunker together, imprisoned under the ground. But his brother shows no sign of going anywhere. He kicks around conspicuously idle, Keeping An Eye on Sam. That’s good, because Sam’s keeping his own eyes on Jess. Eyes for everybody, enough to pass around. They come out easy enough, although they leave a messy socket behind. Sam pictures them in clutches, massed gummy together like frogspawn.

This goes on for some time, all of them merry together and everybody’s eyes at angles. It’s hard to tell how time passes when there’s no natural light. But the thing is that to keep an eye on somebody your eyes have to be open, and as hard as Sam tries he can’t stay awake more than two or three days before everything starts going wobbly and he develops a tendency to pass out cold. It’s better to be in charge of when you go to sleep, he decides, and when Dean and Jess are in their rooms and their lights turned out, he sets his alarm for 4.30am and allots himself a solid four hours. He goes out as soon as his head touches the pillow, dropping straight into sleep like a stone in water. 

He wakes up with Jess beside him, inside him, her hand stuck vicious into his chest.

“Got you, Sammy,” she says, and closes her fingers, grips tight and agonising, clutches his soul and tugs. 

Sam screams, can’t help it, and she pouts at him. “Naughty. Come on, baby, play nice. Don’t pretend you didn’t want this.” She presses up closer, kisses his face. “Don’t pretend you didn’t touch yourself, dreaming about me. You’ve always wanted it, somebody inside you. Want somebody to own you. Whore.” She twists her fist where it’s buried inside him, straining and it’s like his soul is stitched onto his skeleton, tendons linking it to every bone and she’s ripping all of them free. He screams again, the sound burning raw at the back of his throat.

“Sam!” there’s a voice from the doorway, and the light comes on and he’s blinded with it, scrambling painful off the edge of the bed and covering his face with his hands. He blinks through the neon stripes obscuring his vision, and Jess is there in front of him, standing illuminated with her hair streaming and her face pale, her eyes dark and huge. He half-expects to see blood on her hands. 

“No,” he says, and scrabbles back against the wall, away from her. He closes his eyes, screws them up tight, wishes it all away. When he opens them, Dean’s there, crouched down in front of him, and Jess has gone.

“Sammy?”

Sam looks down at his chest. Nothing. He’s okay. 

“I’m sorry. Just a nightmare,” he says.

It’s maybe the day after that when Sam has a brainwave. There’s a spell. He remembers that Dean had a spell when Gadreel was in him: a sigil painted on the wall which should have forced the angel to reveal himself. It only didn’t work because Gadreel was wise to it, broke the enchantment before it could be set. Maybe now, if he could paint it on a wall and coax Jess over beside it… maybe he could be sure. But would that work if it were Lucifer, not in Jess’s body but in just her form? When he’d come to Sam in Oklahoma (into his bed) there had been just the blink of a moment when Sam had looked away, and Jess had transformed into the craggy blond man whose face Sam still sees when he thinks of the Devil. It was a glamour, not a real transformation. Still, the spell Dean cast is at least worth testing. The only problem is that Sam doesn’t know where his brother found it. It must have been in the archives somewhere down here.

He’s right at the back of the furthest storeroom, pulling books out onto the floor, when Jess appears behind him.

“Long time no speak,” she says. “Can I help?”

“No,” Sam tells her. “I’m fine.”

Jess walks up close, sits down cross-legged beside him. “Look,” she says. “I don’t know what happened. I just want to talk. I feel like… ever since we were talking about Lucifer, about the possession. You’ve not been yourself. And then, uh. In bed that time. So I’m sorry. But I think it would be, I think we need to talk.”

“How did you know I was down here?” Sam says.

Jess looks vague. “I just heard you as I was wandering around, I guess.”

“Okay,” he says. “But it’s fine. I’m fine. You can go away.”

She frowns at him, half-smiling. “Sam, this is crazy. I want to help.” She leans forward, drops a hand to his leg, and Sam shoots backward with a force that knocks two full shelves of books to the ground.

“Get away from me!” he says. “Don’t _touch_ me!”

“What the fuck is going on?” says Dean.

It must have been the falling books that summoned him. Dean’s face is blurring in and out of focus but Sam can see in the moments it’s in-focus that his brother is mad. Scared, too, but mostly those emotions translate the same way.

“She’s not Jess,” Sam says, quiet.

“What?” says Jess. She’s standing, now, her words sounding out from somewhere up above him. “What are you talking about? Of course I’m me.” Her voice wobbles. “Sam? What do you mean? You’re not gonna… this isn’t going to be like Brady? Right?” 

“Like Brady?” says Dean.

“He was. Sam thought. Sam says he was possessed,” Jess says, “and he killed him anyway. Killed Brady. And it wasn’t his fault.”

“He was possessed,” says Dean, and he looks down at Sam, frowns a little, nods his head at Jess. “Do you need me to… should I get the holy water?” he asks. Sam shakes his head. 

“He’s not in her. He is her. She’s him.”

“Is who, Sam?”

“Lucifer. He’s. It’s Lucifer. He’s here.”

Dean swallows, takes a step towards him, crouches down. He rests his hand awkward on Sam’s shoulder. “Sammy,” he says. “How could he get in here? It’s warded. Everything’s warded. It took Chuck to power down the protections, before.”

“Please, Dean,” Sam says, frantic. “Please. You gotta believe me.” 

Dean stands up again, meets Jess’s eyes, looks down at Sam. “Sammy -”

“I don’t care,” Jess says, hurried. “Do anything you want. Test me. I don’t care. I’m just. I’m worried about Sam. I don’t think he’s okay down here, Dean. He needs help. I’m scared.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Um. Maybe you better give us a minute.”

Once Jess has gone he crouches down again, his face hovering in Sam’s line of sight, all its features pinched tight with concern. “Sam. You’re not yourself. You know?”

“I’m fine,” Sam says. “I’m me, I’m fine, it’s not me who isn’t myself.”

Dean clears his throat, shakes his head. “Yeah, no. Sam. I know you’re you, but this is a lot. Let’s take some time, okay? This isn’t… this isn’t good for you, man. You’re sick.” He glances over his shoulder. “Maybe we can find somewhere else for Jess to go.”

“No!” Sam says, and clutches Dean’s shirtfront, fingers clawing tight into his brother’s chest. “You can’t let her out, she’s been reading the spellbooks. She’s learned everything here, our secrets. It’s too dangerous. You can’t let her go.”

“Hey,” says Dean, and reaches forward to brush away the hair over Sam’s ear. “I thought you were worried _for_ her, huh? That’s why you kept her here. Remember?”

“No,” says Sam again, but then - if he says that’s the reason, will Dean do what he’s asking? “Yes, okay, for her own safety but. Please. _Don’t let her go._ Please, Dean. Please, you gotta listen to me.”

“Okay,” Dean says, soothing. “Okay. But I think. You’re so tired, Sam.” He runs his thumbs over the soft bags of skin beneath Sam’s eyes. “Will you go and try to take a nap? For me. Please.”

Sam goes to his room and lies down, but there’s no chance of sleeping. Everything around him is shaking, all his realities shivering in and out of time. He’s Sam, in his dorm room in Stanford, curled up weeping in his hard twin bed in a campus left empty for Christmas. He’s Sam in the panic room, hallucinating Mary next to him. He’s Sam two months ago, with his living mother’s arms around his neck. He’s Sam in the Cage, his guts unspooling over and over again. He’s Sam with no soul in him, gutting monsters like so many fish. He’s in Toni’s bed and he’s Lucifer’s bunkmate and Gadreel’s unwitting suit of flesh. He curls himself up in a ball, clutching his stomach, trying to keep himself, all the bits of him, in.

The door scrapes open. Through the hair spread messy over his face, Sam sees Jess’s khaki-clad legs walk into the room. 

Sam locked the door. He remembers turning the key. He _has_ the key in his hand, the teeth biting comforting into his palm.

Jess comes to sit down on the bed beside him. The mattress dips under her weight. She reaches over and pushes the hair back over his forehead, looks down at him, sweet and patient and kind. “Hey, Sam,” she says. “Can you breathe with me?”

Sam flashes back to college, to the library. Late night, his eyes burning. Books stacked in piles, his desk marked out like territory. To the right of him a light-haired girl who always smelled of cigarettes, though Sam had never seen her smoke one. To the left, a stocky dark-skinned guy, who muttered when he read and who drove Sam crazy doing it, but there were no other spaces free and Sam needed to study so bad. And his heart had been running in his chest skip-skipping, the words blurring and Sam gazing at them desperate trying to make them coalesce. Jess had appeared at his side from nowhere, it had seemed, the fresh clean scent of her cutting through the squalor of the library. “Sam,” she’d said. “Baby. When did you last eat?” And Sam hadn’t been able to remember. “How much coffee have you had?” “I don’t know,” he’d told her, and his lungs had constricted, and she’d taken him out to the corridor, counting slowly, teaching him to breathe.

“Baby,” she says to him now. Her hand rubs his back, between his shoulder blades. It should be soothing but it’s chilling Sam right through, like ice is spreading out from her palm. Don’t move, he thinks. Don’t move. “You can’t keep bottling everything up like this,” she says. “Hiding away. You know?”

Maybe she is real, the way Dean thinks she is. Maybe Sam’s been crazy all this time. He should try. Maybe he should give her the benefit of the doubt.

“I know,” he says. “I’ve been. I’ve been confused. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Jess says. “It’s okay, but I’m here. You can talk to me. Can you do that, Sam?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. It’s been. It’s been a long time, and it’s easier, isn’t it? To fold things up tidy and put them away, leave them where they can’t come out again. This thing, Dean not dead and then Mom back and Jess. It’s messing up the filing. He needs to keep things neat. But he knows that isn’t healthy. He should try. He should try.

Jess puts her hand on his face, her skin cool and dry. She turns him to look at her, looks him right in the eyes. “Sam. This is important. Will you let me in?”

Sam needs to breathe but his flesh has turned to marble.

“Sam. Baby. Sam. Speak to me. I need you to say yes,” Jess says.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a LABOUR I cannot begin to describe (I wrote most of it at a truly staggering pace) so if you liked it !!! please tell me!! Nothing gets me happy like people's comments on my fic.


End file.
